BulleTrain is downsized games first original release, shipping soon for the iPhone & iPod Touch.

It’s the year 2124 and giant mega corporations rule the universe. Even though space travel has been achieved, the corporations still use superfast Bullet trains to deliver goods planet side (it must be cheaper, like outsourcing). This makes the Bullet-railroad barons, lead by the dastardly JR, the richest and most powerful people in the galaxy. You used to run a small shipping company on your home planet of Glendon-19 but a hostile takeover by Elaborate Acquisitions, your local B-rail corporation, has left you out on the streets. With the help of your best driver, Atal, you scrape together your last credits and outfit your transport ship/bedroom with enough weaponry to take down the corporations B-rails. It’s time to hand out the pink-slips, in blood. BulleTrain!!!!!!!!!!!

The other night I saw an article on Kotaku, and it came with this picture.

are you threatening me?

Now, it didn’t mean much to me at first until I realized this was a promotional piece from EA for their up-and-coming rip-off Bulletstorm. Then I looked closer and I see the top left corner has a sticker that uncannily resembles the Pandemic logo, and it got me thinking. Is EA implying that this is the ground up meat of ex-Pandemic minions who would dare go up against them? I mean Bulletstorm is clearly an attempt to steal our BulleThunder (TM), are they so afraid they are trying to tenderize us? What’s the deal? I know they are scared, but really $25.99 for ground beef? Only EA could get away with charging those prices.

~ Manny

We’ve been hard at work to get BulleTrain ready for prime time, and we think we’re finally rounding the last bend. From an art perspective, we’ve been done for a while, so I took it upon myself to design some cheeky ads to hopefully get the buzz going again on the ole BTrain. I was holding on to these for the right moment, but when I saw that the season finale episode of Justified (on FX) is named Bulletville… well I thought it was too good to be true. I love me some Justified. If Timothy Olyphant wasn’t already typecast, I would pick him to play Miles Stone without blinking. I mean the original idea for BulleTrain was loosely based on an episode of Firefly, and no disrespect to Captain tight-pants, but Raylan is much more of a bad ass. Shoot, Raylan would have put two holes in Niska and banged his daughter. I’m not sure Niska even had a daughter, or if said daughter would even be hot enough for Raylan, but you gotta think he’d do it just on principal alone. Though you have to give it to Mal when he boot kicked that Crow guy into the ship’s engine. Now I am torn…

So look for more of these ads in the coming weeks, I hope you enjoy them as much as I enjoyed making them. For now it’s back to the bug fixes and tweaks. All aboard!!

~ Manny

I think people keep asking to interview me because they want to see if I say something stupid. It’s pretty much a guarantee that I will say something inflammatory, but I think they want me to say something really and truly horrifyingly stupid. To that I will only say, “it’s only a matter of time so keep the questions coming, I dare you!”

Joystick Division Interview

~ Das Vega

So, I was minding my own business and perusing the Kotaku boards this morning when I got slapped in the face by this article:

Epic unveils Bulletstorm

Bulletstorm? Really? Epic is so jealous of our success and mad shooting skills that they are jumping on the BulleTrain coat tails already? C’mon Cliffy, we know that you’re hurting right now what with your Unreal engine being slapped around by Unity3D, but this is a cheap shot. Seriously dude (huge) are we that much of a threat to you that you gotta horn in on our parade? We don’t have ANY chainsaws in our game in respect to you, but you gotta go and steal our Bullets? If there’s a giant flying space train in your game I would be expecting a call from our lawyer.

~ Manny V. (sounds much cooler than Cliffy B am I right?)

For the two people who visit our site regularly, and were not already linked here via the Gamasutra article, here’s the link:

Gamasutra Interview!!

To say that we are honored to have the chance to have an interview on Gamasutra would be an understatement. Until now, Gamasutra has just been the place we visited to look for work and to troll the comments to make ourselves feel superior. Now we are on the fabled website and people are contacting us offering their services to help Downsized in our endeavors. It’s truly a nerve wracking, but thrilling, experience and I have never talked so much on the phone or typed so much email in my life! Thanks to all of you who have sent kind words, I can’t reply to everyone but know that it is appreciated. Here’s a few more screen shots to whet the appetite, and quell the rumors that we just fabricated the web site to drum up press. Hopefully we’ll be better prepared to be outed.